Do you want to do a pull-up? Can you already do a few, but want to move forward from here? In our series of year-end fitness benchmarks, here are several levels of pull-up oriented tests to gauge your progress.

Our quest to explain every weird thing at the gym has now landed on Fat Gripz, the heavy rubber handles, often blue, that you can wrap around barbells and dumbbells. Their main job is to make the bar harder to hold onto, which can be a good thing.

Front squats are a great exercise to work into your routine, but some of us have a hard time getting comfortable with a bar right in front of our neck and our wrists cocked back. If this sounds like you, we have a few options you can try.

We’ve all seen that Peloton ad where a woman is gifted one of the company’s very fancy bikes. Some people find the ad cringe-inducing and bizarre; others would freaking kill for a Peloton under the tree.

Like most guys of a certain vintage, I have mixed feelings about my body. Staying lean and not surrendering to the siren’s call of the dreaded 'Dadbod' is a key concern. But then so is building and maintaining enough muscle so that I can keep up with the young bucks on the soccer field or in the gym.

One of the main keys to success is your diet. You need a meal plan that's high in healthy carbs, fats and proteins. More importantly, it needs to be easy to prepare and affordable - so you'll actually stick to it.

Zero exercise is not enough. Going for a walk every day is probably a good thing. And if you're training for a marathon, you'll be on your feet for a couple hours of hard workouts every week. But what is the benchmark for a human being just trying to squeeze enough healthy exercise into their life? Let's break it down.

For the last month of 2019, we’re going to do some exercises to measure progress and set goals. Whether you’ve worked out a lot this year or you’re just starting, taking a specific benchmark now will help you appreciate your current and future progress. Today we’re starting with flexibility.

Arbitrary strength classifications are stupid. I know this, and yet I keep looking up how my lifts compare on various charts and tools. The best, and most fun, among them: SymmetricStrength.com.

Finding clear, definitive facts about healthy exercise can be difficult. The exercise industry is a multi-billion dollar business, built partially on selling gadgets and supplements to people desperate to lose weight or look attractive. Meanwhile, good workout plans and simple truths lurk in the background waiting for their time to shine. All of this results in lots of misinformation about exercise. We're taking some of those commonly-held exercise myths to task, and we have science to back us up. Let's get started.

If you’re used to a class, doing yoga on your own can be daunting—which poses should you choose? Or if you’re following along with a flow you found online, how can you modify or replace something that’s not quite at the right level for you? This chart from Stack52 can help you find the right pose.

You can get fit by running outdoors, or by exercising at a fancy gym, but in the end all your muscles care about is that they got to contract a bunch of times. Need a workout you can do when you’re stuck in one place with no gear? Ask a former prisoner.

It might seem like there are perks to exercising on an empty stomach, like burning more fat per workout, but the downsides greatly outweigh the benefits. Here's why you're probably better off fuelling up before you go for a run or crank out some super sets at the gym.

I hope you like holding a barbell in the crooks of your elbows, because that’s what we’re doing for our last weird lift of the month. The zercher lift, or zercher squat, has you do just that.

I’ve been lifting for a long time, but only really got serious about my squat, bench, and deadlift a little over a year ago. Last week I finally did a powerlifting meet. I had a great time, learned a lot, and put a lot of the beginner advice I’d been given to the test.

My son has learned a lot from his martial arts teacher—so many wonderful lessons about respect, discipline, determination and confidence. But my favourite take-away from the past two years of his training: Kids don’t mind doing a bunch of push-ups, sit-ups and jumping jacks if you let them roll giant dice across the floor first.

So far in our weird lifts challenge, I’ve asked you to do a one-handed deadlift and a one-handed dumbbell snatch. Now here’s a relief: for this week’s lift, I’ll let you put both hands on the barbell. We’re doing Jefferson deadlifts.

Ahhh, the elusive six pack. For many, it's the holy grail of fitness. But does your life really change after you've achieved one? Let's take a look at the ways that getting a six pack changes your life and when it's really just fool's gold.

If you don’t have time to exercise, welcome to the club. (I do exercise a lot, but some days I get overwhelmed by how much time and effort it takes to commit to an entire workout done in gym clothes at a specific place and time.) A way around this: the exercise snack.

I’m glad that more than zero of you joined me for the one hand deadlift last week. Weird but cool, right? We’ve got another one handed lift this week, and this one goes overhead, which makes it extra badass. It’s a one hand dumbbell snatch.